Design by: Ibrahim Yahya
PUBLISHED
March 08, 2026
KARACHI:
Over time, billboards across major cities have begun to use the language of empowerment, celebrating the “strong woman,” the “empowered leader,” the “girl boss,” especially closer to special occasions such as International Women’s Day. In that brief passing moment, a one-off advertisement, or a corporate campaign, it appears as if women are finally considered equals. But it does not take long for the alluring illusions to shatter, even if public relations (PR) campaigns turn a blind eye to it, as the structures that shape women’s lives remain largely unchanged.
For many women, this rhetoric of empowerment is paradoxical when compared to their everyday experiences. Inequality is not simply expressed through isolated incidents but in education, labour, law enforcement, and social norms that continue to restrict women’s participation in public life.
One of the startling reminders of this inequality is violence against women, which remains widespread across both private and public spheres. According to the United Nations, multiple forms of violence against women are prevalent in Pakistan. The consequences extend far beyond immediate physical harm. Violence, or the threat of it, shapes mobility, restricts participation in public life, erodes confidence, and leaves women with a diminished presence in leadership and decision-making spaces.
Domestic abuse in particular continues to be treated as a private matter, seldom discussed openly and even less frequently reported, especially in economically vulnerable households. The absence of reliable data further obscures the scale of the problem, creating a cycle in which underreporting makes it harder to design policies or interventions.
Education, often described as the gateway to opportunity, too, remains inaccessible to millions of girls across Pakistan. According to a recent report by the Malala Fund, around 13 million girls in the country are out of school. Many are kept away not only by poverty but by a combination of hidden school costs, unsafe or damaged classrooms, the absence of female teachers, and education policies that do not prioritise girls’ needs.
While in recent decades, the country has passed a number of progressive laws aimed at protecting women from harmful practices and strengthening their rights, such as the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act (2010), the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act 2026, and legal provisions against forced marriage, enforcement gaps between legislation and justice remain wide. Survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) are faced with a system that is ill-equipped to support them and deeply entrenched patriarchal norms.
Mahnoor Omer, a lawyer and activist who recently earned the title of TIME’s Woman of the Year for her advocacy and public impact, recognised this anomaly as using women as political tools.
“State narrative is misleading. It uses women’s empowerment as soft power currency. It instrumentalises them. It picks up a few success stories to show this is the reality for all women,” she said.
Breaking open this myth, she observed, “Women in Pakistan have such diverse experiences that it is difficult to speak about one common experience. A woman from Balochistan has a significantly different reality than that of someone in rural Punjab, or a Hindu, or a Christian girl.” This particularly speaks of the palpable divides between urban centres and the periphery. While women in major cities may have relatively better access to education, employment, and safer working environments, those in marginalized regions often face far harsher realities, at times taking to the streets to protest for missing loved ones, fighting not only for justice but for even the basic recognition of their grief.
Nida Usman Chaudhary, founder of the Women in Law Initiative, pointed out the patriarchal structuring of society and said, “Time and again, we have been reminded that women need to be respected because they are someone’s wife, sister, mother, or daughter. Their own identity and existence as an individual, as a human, does not get mentioned whenever we talk about women worthy of our respect.”
These stereotypical notions have been reinforced through popular culture, including dramas, novels, advertisements on national television, and other media, all of which reduce and objectify women. The consequence, according to Omer, is a culture that silences them entirely: “Women don’t talk about their experiences, mostly because of the lack of empathy from men.” The gap between rhetoric and reality is also reflected globally as Pakistan ranked last in the 2025 Global Gender Gap Index by the World Economic Forum, highlighting a web of disparities in opportunity, political participation, and economic stability.
Layered barriers
Before matters of representation arise, the limits placed on women’s participation begin much earlier, in childhood itself, in classrooms and within the expectations of family life. They appear in layers, shaping the opportunities available to girls at each stage of their lives and narrowing the pathways through which they can enter public and later professional spaces.
Between the earliest years of schooling and grade 10, nearly 70% of girls in Pakistan drop out of the education system. The numbers vary across provinces, around 65% in Punjab, 76% in Sindh, 74% in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), and as high as 86% in Balochistan.
Punjab alone accounts for nearly 4.83 million out-of-school girls, the highest in the country. Sindh follows with 4.09 million, while K-P has 2.29 million and Balochistan has 1.53 million. Even in the capital, more than 40,000 girls remain outside the education system.
Beyond poverty, damaged or unsafe infrastructure, long travel distances, and a shortage of female teachers all contribute to keeping girls out of classrooms. Education budgets and policies frequently fall short of these gender-specific barriers.
In many households, for example, professional degrees for women are valued less as pathways to careers and more as markers of social status. The phrase “doctor bahu,” the highly educated bride, reflects this contradiction. Academic achievement can enhance marriage prospects, but it does not necessarily guarantee a long-term presence in the workforce.
Explaining these challenges, Chaudhary said, “Women’s safety and mobility remain key barriers, and their participation in the labour force is also impacted by their lack of autonomy and lack of support that can lead towards shared care responsibilities, freeing up time for them to participate fully in the workforce. Women’s unpaid care labour is taken for granted, and flexible work arrangements are still viewed suspiciously.”
Social expectations also continue to shape women’s choices after they complete their education, as honour, reputation, and marriageability remain powerful forces in determining which opportunities are considered acceptable.
“Historically, the narratives around women, their rights and autonomy have been shaped through the lens of religiosity and patriarchy – two tools that have been used to project our ideas of honour, good women in the society,” Chaudhary added.
“Feminism of the 80s was focused on challenging the state laws suppressing and reducing women and their testimonies to half, whereas the 4th wave of feminism we see today is challenging the patriarchy and the inequality that begins right from homes, in the framing of what good women do and do not do,” she elaborated.
These traditional, conservative narratives, that also have colonial underlinings along with patriarchy and religious interpretations that have long been done by men, she noted. They have normalised victim-blaming and shaming where the victim is a woman because the idea projected is that had a woman been ‘good,’ she would have obeyed, stayed at home, not stepped out, guarded her honour, conflating domesticated ideas of a woman as the pious honourable woman versus a woman who steps out of her house and gets harassed.
Chaudhary resisted this framing because evidence suggests that even homes are not safe spaces, and cases of incest are often reported.
Omer highlighted insensitive reporting even by leading newspapers and media channels, which report “incidents like a grocery list.” She suggested adopting affect in sensitive reporting, being mindful that “it is a matter of life and death for a human being.”
For Omer, who recently challenged the period tax, sparking national debate on menstrual health and equality, the term feminism itself was taboo. She did not call herself a feminist until she was in her mid-teens, as she advocated for women’s empowerment. “The term feminism has often been co-opted by liberal thought, which allies itself with imperialism, especially packaged for the ‘greater good’ of the Global South,” she emphasised, quoting the famous line,
“White men saving brown women from brown men,” that rings true in the current imperial justifications for the war on Iran.
She pointed to examples of Malthusian population control policies where the World
Bank-funded programs gave out contraceptives under the guise of encouraging working women. However, many women fell sick and died due to sterilisation and outdated contraceptives.
Instead, she suggested, “We need solutions that are suitable for our context, that emerge from here. Policies are made based on research, and we need to step up in research.”
When asked about the victim-blaming narrative, she said, “The victim-blaming narrative is a result of ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ We learn from our dining room conversations. What really cements it are such comments from leaders that give the common man authority. The counter-narrative would be to change the conversation.”
Describing the changing tide, she stated, “Social media is the reason many young women are able to raise their voice, organise to whatever extent possible in current circumstances. It allows like-minded people to meet. It creates a third space for discussion in a place where there are not many open spaces for young people.”
Gap between law and justice
Over the past two decades, Pakistan has enacted a range of laws aimed at protecting women from violence and discrimination. Yet the existence of laws has not necessarily translated into accessible justice or adequate protection.
For many women, the legal system remains distant, slow, and difficult to navigate. Survivors of gender-based violence often face hurdles, social stigma, and institutions that lack the resources or training needed to respond effectively.
The law, Omer argued, is like a watchdog with no teeth. While the law mentions availability of legal aid and assistance, there is hardly any for women, she explained, adding, “What is the point of laws when no one really gets punished? It shows a disconnect between wording and implementation.”
Lahore-based diversity and inclusion advocate points to another layer of failure. “There are still several issues in implementation across provinces because of different definitions and the scope of laws after the 18th amendment,” observed Chaudhary. “There is no uniform application—each province has enacted its own law.”
Another issue she highlighted is that of a lack of resources to implement the domestic violence law, for instance, at the time when it was passed, because the government did not have the infrastructure to put it into practice, as the process has been gradual.
Mindset remains a major challenge, where till now medico-legal staff and even some police officers and judges as well as lawyers may not be fully updated with how the law defines violence. “The insistence on broken bones and marks shows a lack of training and understanding of first responders and other stakeholders in the justice sector, who may need to keep their own biases aside when applying the laws,” Chaudhary added.
Despite cases of violence against women on the rise, women make up only around 1.5% of police personnel in Pakistan, limiting the availability of gender-sensitive support for survivors approaching law enforcement. Many women remain reluctant to file complaints in environments where male-dominated police stations and social pressures can discourage them from pursuing cases. Domestic violence, in particular, is still widely viewed as a private matter, often settled within families rather than through formal legal channels.
Investigations into gender-based violence can take more than six weeks, and the submission of challans may take up to five months, weakening the prospects of effective prosecution.
Even when cases reach the courts, conviction rates remain strikingly low, estimated between 1-2.5% in cases related to gender-based violence. Meanwhile, around 70% of incidents go unreported altogether, according to documents presented before the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights in 2025.
Beyond policing and courts, access to shelters, material aid, and support services remains limited, especially outside major urban centres.
However, noting the power of social media, Chaudhary mentioned, “The recent developments in the passport where women’s petitions in court eventually led the passport authority to allow women to keep their father’s name on their passports were the result of the advocacy and the interest this petition generated online. In the kind of world we live in today, our online and offline worlds are blurred, and they will continue to influence and impact each other, so all such spaces are important for women to be in.”
Omer suggested, “Investing priorities must show genuine care for the female population. When laws like PECA are employed against the glorification of terrorism, they can also be used against anyone glorifying abuse against women. The apparatus exists, but needs to be employed for the right reasons.”
Structures of power, structures of inequality
Gender inequality is woven into the societal fabric of land ownership, financial access, environmental vulnerability, and the functioning of state institutions. The challenges women face highlight how resources and opportunities are distributed across society.
One of the most significant of these structural inequalities lies in land and property ownership. Although Islamic and statutory laws guarantee women a share in inheritance, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Social pressures, family negotiations, and informal arrangements frequently prevent women from claiming their legal share of property.
Expanding on this, Chaudhary observed, “A woman questioning her place or demanding her inheritance is not seen as asserting her rights—it is seen as dishonourable. This is because it is also about power located in owning and retaining capital and not allowing the women the financial freedom so as not to lose ‘control’ over them.”
The cycle of subjugation, control, and power plays a role in denying inheritance rights, often murdering sisters on the pretext of honour.
In terms of legal protections, procedures and forums, they exists mainly in Punjab and Islamabad, such as the ombudsperson offices, where women can go and enforce their property rights in a more accessible manner than a civil court but what holds women back are the issue of financial dependence, lack of mobility, and confidence to claim their rights in the society and above all, the lack of awareness of their rights and the backlash they may face from families if they demand them from the courts.
For women living in rural districts, courts and legal services are located hours away, requiring travel that is both costly and socially discouraged.
Referring to the approach of Musawah, a global movement for equality and justice launched in Malaysia, Chaudhary emphasised that their messaging in a culturally sensitive manner, but within the framework of universal human rights and by feminist interpretations of Islam, is a step in the right direction. They often cite developments from other Islamic jurisdictions and countries, which show progressive developments and interpretations that are aligned with universal human rights.
The award-winning gender rights advocate believed that addressing society’s polarisation requires knowing our history and engaging with progressive interpretations from countries with similar cultural contexts, and shared histories, especially the Global South, to look for other possibilities.
In Pakistan’s case, recognition alone cannot dismantle the structures that continue to shape the lives of women. The barriers that begin early, in homes, in classrooms, and throughout society, Chaudhary pointed out, are reinforced by social expectations and tied to structural inequalities that demand both answers and action.
Not too long ago, the late feminist scholar and activist Rubina Saigol reminded us that International Women’s Day emerged from socialist movements and working-class mobilisation—a day born of protest and collective struggle, a call to actively reflect on and create a more equal world for all. But remembrance is not enough. If International Women’s Day is to carry substantial meaning, it cannot remain confined to gestures defined by the same dominant powers it once sought to challenge.
